100 Individual Lightning Bolts

A time-lapse image of lightning bolts from a thunderstorm near Mudanya in Turkey on June 16. (Image credit: Uğur İkizler)

A photographer has captured a striking time-lapse photo of more than 100 individual lightning bolts during a fierce thunderstorm in Turkey.

Astrophotographer Uğur İkizler created the electrifying image by combining shots of the sky near his home in the coastal town of Mudanya. The individual images were collected over a 50-minute period around midnight on June 16 — meaning that, on average, there was a lightning strike every 30 seconds.

“Each and every one of them is beautiful, but when I combined all the lightning bolts into a single frame, it was a frightening sight,” İkizler told Live Science in an email. The thunderstorm was a “magnificent visual feast,” he added.
Harry Baker, Electrifying time-lapse image captures 100 lightning bolts torching the sky over Turkey, Live Science, June 2023.

Out in the American heartland, lightning hit the Gateway arch yesterday. Photographer Dan Robinson captured the strike on camera.

I have been intensively covering St. Louis storms since January of 2010, and my photography and video operations result in having a camera on the Arch for the duration of most storms downtown. My gallery of photos shows the results from that effort. The consequence of this ongoing project is that I have a directly-observed count of Arch strikes over the ten-year period from 2010 to 2023. Since 2010, there have only been a total of nine verifiable full lightning strikes to the Gateway Arch (average of less than once per year), with some years seeing no strikes at all. Three of those nine strikes occured in less than one hour during the exceptionally rare July 19, 2020 storm.
Dan Robinson, How many times is the Gateway Arch struck by lightning each year?

Meanwhile, Flash (2023) is losing speed at the box office.